The present invention relates to an external cavity laser on silicon, and more specifically, to silicon external cavity laser based superchannel transceivers.
An optical cavity or optical resonator is an arrangement of mirrors that forms a standing wave cavity resonator for light waves. Optical cavities are a major component of lasers, surrounding the gain medium and providing feedback of the laser light. They are also used in optical parametric oscillators and some interferometers. Light confined in the cavity reflects multiple times, producing standing waves for certain resonance frequencies. The standing wave patterns produced are called modes. Longitudinal modes differ only in frequency while transverse modes differ for different frequencies and have different intensity patterns across the cross section of the beam.
Different resonator types are distinguished by the focal lengths of the two mirrors and the distance between them. Flat mirrors are not often used because of the difficulty of aligning them to the needed precision. The geometry (resonator type) must be chosen so that the beam remains stable, which means that the size of the beam does not continually grow with multiple reflections. Resonator types are also designed to meet other criteria such as minimum beam waist or having no focal point inside the cavity. Optical cavities are designed to have a large Q factor, which means that the light beam will reflect a very large number of times with little attenuation. Therefore, the frequency line width of the beam is very small compared to the frequency of the laser.
Light confined in a resonator will reflect multiple times from the mirrors, and due to the effects of interference, only certain patterns and frequencies of radiation will be sustained by the resonator, with the others being suppressed by destructive interference. In general, radiation patterns which are reproduced on every round-trip of the light through the resonator are the most stable, and these are the eigenmodes, known as the modes, of the resonator.
Resonator modes can be divided into two types: longitudinal modes, which differ in frequency from each other; and transverse modes, which may differ in both frequency and the intensity pattern of the light. The basic or fundamental transverse mode of a resonator is a Gaussian beam.
The most common types of optical cavities consist of two facing plane (flat) or spherical mirrors. The simplest of these is the plane-parallel or Fabry-Pérot cavity, consisting of two opposing flat mirrors. Plane-parallel resonators are therefore commonly used in microchip lasers, microcavity lasers, and semiconductor lasers. In these cases, rather than using separate mirrors, a reflective optical coating may be directly applied to the laser medium itself.